


Vincent's Skeleton

by igraniecain



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Artist Feels, Depression, Epic Bromance, Flashbacks, Immortals, Not sure if this even qualifies as Fanfic, Skeleton feels, Suicide, Vincent and the Doctor, Vincent and the Doctor without the Doctor, all the feels, whaeva
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-18
Updated: 2016-08-18
Packaged: 2018-08-09 13:43:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7804093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igraniecain/pseuds/igraniecain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He goes to the museum.<br/>At night.<br/>And chills.</p>
<p>Also gets intense feels because of a certain dead, artistic fuckwit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vincent's Skeleton

He’d been sitting there again for hours. Not moving, just gazin.

     It was night time and no lights were burning in the museum – Not that he would have needed them. Sitting there in solitude, on his usual bench, in his usual section, he couldn’t help but think of the past. Nothing specific really … just the notion of things long since lived through; thought through at least a million times. He shouldn’t be doing this. Not after this long. It wasn’t exactly healthy, he knew that much. But somehow he just couldn’t seem to care enough – or rather care too little – to stop.

     He once tried coming here during the day, but all the people were just so … irritating. He didn’t like the way they looked at the paintings. Bored glances of students, dragged into the exhibition by their teachers. Fake interested looks by people not wanting to tell their dates that they didn’t fancy art all that much. Snobbish sophisticated stares by the odd professor, creeping around far longer than strictly necessary.

     So he had gone back to night time visits, the alarm system long since no obstacle for him anymore. Usually he stayed one or two hours. Sometimes walking around, often just sitting here, in front of this one painting. The one that was and wasn’t his.

     He missed him, that much was obvious, but he had missed people before and never made a fuss about it, so it was a mystery to him why he was still coming back here every week just to see the paintings, to let himself think about things passed…

 

* * *

 

_… In the evening the man had come into the room that he would always, for the matter of simplicity, refer to as ‘his’. It certainly hadn’t been the first time that he had done so, but this particular night was singled out by the fact that it was the first time they spoke._

_He had not been planning on startling the man, but it seemed he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. All the other times the man had sneaked in after work to perfect his paintings, he had been watching from the corner – always slightly obscured by the shadows. But this time, the man had made him stand in the middle of the room, because his new project was to be a portrait of him with an unlit cigarette in his mouth._

_“The least you can do is light it, for heaven’s sake.”, he had said, because he’d been feeling a little awkward just then and simply had to break the silence._

_“Well, I’ll be damned.”, the man had answered after staring at him in in surprise for a while. He hadn’t really been able to blame him, still couldn’t – after all, his opener to the conversation was not exactly what you would call ‘smooth’. But, heck, he had to roll with it now, so he went on._

_“Last time I checked, smoking was not one of the deadly sins.”_

_“You can talk.”_

_“Thanks for stating the obvious, mate.”_

_The man had looked away from him then and let his gaze fall to the bottle of booze that accompanied each of his nightly visits._

_“I have had enough, haven’t I?”_

_“I don’t know. You tell me.”_

_“You’re talking, so I obviously have.”_

_“Oh, don’t stop on my account.”_

_That had been when the man closed his eyes, shook his head, packed up his art supplies and made to leave. The situation really was a bit too much to handle, if one was being honest with oneself._

_After the man had left, he just stood there in the middle of the room a little longer. The new position giving him a different view on things, both literally and figuratively. He sighed …_

 

* * *

 

…just like he did now, coming back to himself. He buried his head in his hands for one moment, maybe two. Then he looked over … to another portrait. The man in the painting looked back at him, sternly. And yet … the blue swirls in the background softened out the intended glare. Let you see behind that mask of a face and glimpse a shred of how _he_ must have seen the world: swirling with colours, endlessly in motion.

     One of the dreadful art teachers that he had had the misfortune of coming across on his one daytime visit had tried to see an abundance of absurd things in the painting. She’d explained ridiculous observations and interpretations that were so horribly farfetched that he had felt as if he would, against his nature, throw up, simply from listening to her.

     “Wonder what you would have said to her.”, he said, tilting his head slightly to the left, mimicking the portrait. “Do you remember that time when you wanted to sell one of your paintings – was it the fruits? Yes, the fruits…anyhow – you wanted to sell it to that rich stuck-up merchant and he just wouldn’t buy it, so you came up with some really elaborate interpretation of your own work and went on and on and on, until you just couldn’t anymore because it was simply too outrageous. Then you stopped and laughed at yourself so hard that the merchant became really uneasy and left since he thought that being seen doing business with a madman would be bad for his reputation.”

     He chuckled at the memory…until he remembered some more; remembered what had happened after that…

 

* * *

 

_…it was in the afternoon that he had come by Vince’s house and found him, curled up in an old blanket on his bed, facing the wall._

_“Vince, are you alright?”, he had asked, stepping closer to the bed._

_“Leave me.”, Vince had mumbled without turning toward him._

_“I won’t.”, he had said with conviction as he had stood there not quite sure_ what _to do. Then he had slowly bent down and laid a hand onto the other man’s shoulder. Almost unnoticeably, Vince had shifted to lean into the touch._

_“They didn’t want your paintings?”_

_“No, they didn’t. And that’s alright, actually, I’m used to it…I…I don’t know what was different about this time…but…I…I fear the hollowness is back”, Vince had said and curled up tighter, now shuddering with dry sobs._

_The Hollowness. Their way of describing Vince’s dark moods that would ever so often drive out all the joy and energy the painter usually displayed. Vincent had said that it wasn’t that he was feeling sad, but rather that he was feeling the absence of something that he hadn’t noticed to be there at any point of his existence. But the lack of it was visibly tearing him apart now._

_He had started to worry about his unstable friend a long time ago, but somewhere around that day in early summer, worry had turned into fear. Fear of what Vince would do to evade these moods in the future._

_He’d planned to figure out something more permanent later, but then and there he had been in need of a more instant solution. So he had manhandled Vince out of bed and into a chair. He’d placed a bottle of booze and cards on the table before him and had spent all evening talking about funny stories from his past, even though – or maybe just because of the fact that he by no means liked to dwell on those and almost never told anyone anything_ real _about himself. He told it all to Vincent, though, without much of an effort, driven only by the small ghosting smile on his friend’s face.  
_

 

* * *

 

If not for his nature, there would not have been a smile on his face now. Sadly there was though, a painful ever grinning mask hiding him from everyone.

     “I never told anyone the things I told you. No one but you knew of my life.”, he said to one of the portraits of his long lost friend.

     And it was true, no one knew of the adventures he had had and the dangers he had faced. No one knew the story of his lonely bones. He had thought it would hurt too much to live _and_ out-live at the same time, especially since he wasn’t really supposed to do either of that. So he had stayed alone, until Vincent. But with him he had suddenly been happy, could suddenly forget about the ever looming danger of loneliness. And that’s how he’d known. Known that it would end.

 

* * *

 

_He had found the note one summer afternoon, cramped in between art supplies. He had stared at it in disbelief for much too long before he snapped out of his stupor, turned to the door and ran. Ran to the one place he knew Vincent would be. He had run fast and he had run far, eternally grateful for the absence of lungs. Finally, he had gotten out of the city, coming to a halt at the edge of Vince’s favourite cornfield – he had painted it over and over – and that had been when he had seen him. Vince had stood in the middle of the field, facing the countryside, away from the town. He had shouted, cursed and yelled while making his way over to him. Vince had not turned around. When he had been maybe ten metres away, a gun went off and Vince had jerked back._

_“No! Vince!”, he had screamed, closing the final distance. And that had been when Vince finally turned around and looked at him. He had stopped short as a result, as Vince had looked …fine, apart from the obvious chest wound of course. He had stood upright; no sign of pain whatsoever._

_“You always seem so happy – much happier than_ me _anyway. I want to be more like you, my friend.” Vince had staggered a bit then and he had to sling a bony arm around him to steady him._

_They had walked back into town in a weird unstable sort of way. He had tried to keep Vince talking just so he wouldn’t suddenly slip into unconsciousness. At the hospital Vince had been ushered in urgently and he had almost lost sight of him. Later, in a single bare hospital room he had sat at Vincent’s bedside, worrying. He had had to stay away from the doctors and creep in unnoticed, so he hadn’t known how bad his friend actually was. He had been pale though, the blood loss having taken its toll on him._

_He had only left his position as a faithful watch dog when he had heard someone shouting in the hallway; someone who had sounded vaguely like Vince’ brother, Theo. He had hid outside the door when Theo burst into the room, waking Vince from his uneasy slumber. It was only then that he realised just how frail his friend had really gotten. When he had tried to sit up he failed and instead just lay there, staring up at the ceiling. Gone was the mostly healthy and energetic man from only hours ago, replaced by an already almost corpse-like creature, inhabiting his shell._

_He had heard the brothers’ soft voices, but had not been able to make out any other words than ‘The sadness will last forever’, right at the end. These words had been spoken slightly louder, with audible effort, when Vince had locked one final gaze with him before sinking back. He had not been able to stay after that…_

 

* * *

  

“Your sadness would not have lasted forever, you bastard!”, he yelled, coming back to himself in the here and now and kicked a rubbish bin, because he seriously needed to vent his frustration and the bin was the only thing near him that wasn’t a priceless painting of and by a certain dead fuckwit.

     “We could have worked it out.”

     He fell silent then. And when the bin that was rolling about on its side banged against the wall, he immediately felt bad for kicking it. It really isn’t its fault. He trotted over and picked it up again.

     After that, he leaned against the wall next to it and let himself slide down, sighing. He settled, one leg outstretched, one folded a bit, his head angled back in a way that he could rest it against the wall and look at the ceiling.

     He looked back into the room and realised that he could see them all from there, all of his favourites:

     His starry nights: little bright pieces of darkness sprinkled with light. The sometimes nightmare-ish cafés, in their slightly off and unrealistic colouring that made you uneasy and made you wonder. The never fully still still lifes that were able to transform the ordinary into something of absolutely extraordinary beauty and of course, no matter how arrogant it sounded, his own portrait. It felt like the reflection of a time travelling mirror looking at it now, so many years later.

     First he’d been graced with temporary artistic immortality, then the real thing.

     But he'd give it all up; throw it all away for just one more day, one hour, hell **,** one bloody conversation... with this mad, sad and unfortunately very dead man. He missed him so much that it hurt his unfeeling bones and rattled him to his hollow core.

     “Enough”, he said and stood up.

     He looked at the cigarette he didn't remember taking out of the pack he always had with him for no other apparent reason than habit. “It really isn’t fair that you still have such power over me, Vince. I haven't smoked in decades.”, he threw the unlit cigarette away. “Only because I'm dead doesn't mean that I don't give a fuck about my health, after all.”

     And with that he walked out into the night, under the watchful gaze of painted eyes and stars.

**Author's Note:**

> As said I have no idea if this qualifies.  
> If it does, good. If it doesn't, ... oh well.
> 
> There is a blog. There are more stories. Other stories.  
> igraniecain.wordpress.com
> 
> If you check it out, good. If you don't, ... oh well.


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